The river or the rock they say, which is it that shapes the other? Does the river make smooth the rocks to tumble through the waters on their way to the braided plains, or do the greater rocks nudge the river, too hard to be pushed aside and dragged to the oceans? Does the river fall into the arms of the rocky terraces, a lover’s embrace holding it fast to the long slow descent to the sea? Or does the rock shoulder aside the waters, constraining their freedom, hedging them from the soft soil, lest they drag their own banks out to the flooded river mouth?
Out in the wilderness lives another people, a distant folk who buy their pleasures by fuelling the ovens and lights of the City, its insatiable appetite reaching across field and fen to the edges of the great dark forests of the morning light. The forests, ancient, reach back beyond memory into the old time of the world when the Sun would sprint across the heavens, impatient with youth and ardour to finish his days work, a time long before Maui and his brothers came with club and rope to bind and order the skies, and make the Sun to rotate slowly, slowly, north and south in new seasons.
Then the Children of the Shadows lived lives of the Fey, born in the boughs of their great trees, eating the fruits of the forest, harvesting gardens in the glades and hollows, drinking from the streams shaped by the daily rains, until a new kind of time came to the lands, and the Children were irrevocably drawn into the orbit of the City.
It started slowly enough, traders come looking for the shiny and new, perhaps one or two per season, each seeking seed or novelty, some small thing to provide them an edge in the markets; a dye to colour the cloth of the great houses, animals to amuse the masses in the squares, or tales to sell to Skald and Bard alike.
No one knows who created it first, just that it was made, and with it the face of the forest changed forever. The Black Wood, a charcoal the heart of the great trees, taken by felling and splitting the grandfather trunk into large nuggets, and burning them by night in pits belching smoke and ash.
The Black Wood changed the City in turn, a cheap, lite, and easy energy that took the place of dried manure, detritus, or scattered sticks from the peripheral fields beyond the last houses and small farms. With the trading of the Black Wood the hunger of the people came to the Fey folk like a plague, with it a knowing of the pleasure of the small thing, the trinket and the glossy cover, the cape of consumption folding across and over them, making gems and metals a food, eating their own ancestors and wombs.
And so it was that the light fell for the first time in a God’s age upon the bleaching soils of the forests, and in the cracked and drying earth a small, insipid enemy of the trees found an easy place to root, and grew. Pollenated by the wind, across the open places it crept and spread, its flowers brilliant and alluring, a poison to creatures and insect alike, so dense they smother all and everything, climbing up and over the shrubs and bushes that made shelter for the saplings of the great trees. A beautiful, sweet-scented death, clamouring at the feet of the Fey, devouring their garden and wasteland alike, perhaps the mirror of their hunger, perhaps the consequence.
But still the hunger of the city overtakes them, and the forest falls to make for them delights.
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